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OpenStack Powered by VMware vSphere Demo Video

An earlier post I theorized that VMware was looking to basically rebrand OpenStack as just another VMware tool or add-on. I don’t really believe OpenStack competes directly with vCloud and especially vSphere as OpenStack doesn’t offer its own official hypervisor.

With the release of the Grizzly version of OpenStack comes and new VMware driver that allows interoperability between vCenter and OpenStack. Scott Lowe of VMware/Nicira gives a demo of OpenStack integration with a vSphere environment that includes Nicira Networking, VMware HA, DRS and vCenter. I think the video speaks for itself where VMware is headed in their relationship with OpenStack.

Something about seeing this in action further makes me suspect that VMware is “all in” OpenStack. I wouldn’t be surprised if VMware releases it’s own OpenStack packgage – vOpenStack if you’d like. Why not all of the other major OpenStack players have their own distributions. Why not VMware with highly integrated “add-ons” for vSphere. Ideally, it would be ways to sell more “vSphere Enterprise Plus + OpenStack” SKU.

7 thoughts on “OpenStack Powered by VMware vSphere Demo Video”

I’m sure this is interesting for the people who never looked at the components involved or how they work.

For everyone else these demo’s are incredibly boring. Why ? Because these are the things that just work, they work exactly as you would expect if you knew what openstack, vmware and Nicera webinterfaces looks like.

What is much more interesting is what happends if you suspend the VM from the webclient instead. 😉

It made me think of a bunch of operational questions around OpenStack in general. One question is the built-in reporting capability. Assuming you have a multi-hypervisor environment you’d want some of the same robust canned reporting you get from vCenter from the OpenStack portal.

But, I guess if you are deploying OpenStack you have the DBA muscle to create your own reporting engine.